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One of my mentors once coined the phrase, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” This simple statement proposes the notion that as a team, people can accomplish more by working together than they can as individuals. However, this also means that the team must work collaboratively and in concert with one another in order to capitalize on each other’s strengths. Failure to work as a team in a cooperative manner can result in frustration, mistakes, lost productivity, and poor morale.

The same holds true for technology…allow me to explain.

At Spectralink, we know our healthcare customers work in an environment that is chaotic and complex with a wide variety of systems, processes, and tools that must work together in order to achieve desired outcomes. As such, the components of these various technologies must operate in concert with one another and collaborate as a whole in order to meet the needs of the professional clinician and, ultimately, their patients. The key to collaboration is interoperability. When you consider the complexity of a hospital setting with all the great technology housed under one roof, you come to appreciate the challenges faced by both the clinical and IT staff.

The key to collaboration is interoperability.

In the Spectralink world, we operate in the ever-growing Wi-Fi space which means we must have interoperability with multiple access points, wireless controllers, phone systems, and network infrastructures. On top of that, in order to support our users as a comprehensive mobile communication solution, we must also have interoperability with various hospital systems like nurse call, patient monitoring, EHR platforms, and secure testing to name a few. When all these components work together in harmony, smart work gets done and the outcomes hospitals are aiming to achieve get accomplished.

At Spectralink, we work diligently with dozens of technology partners to ensure that our mobile devices support their solution and we do it in such a way that the integration of the individual parts working together is greater than the components on their own. If you fail to focus on the importance of interoperability and the need for collaboration, you will stagnate.

As the saying goes, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.” But, when organizations are able to collaborate and work together on a total solution that incorporates the best of breed solutions working together, clinicians are better equipped to deliver on their promise of better patient care and improved outcomes.